Three Californias: Why It’s Not an Eccentric Idea : Governance: Sacramento gridlock, ethnic division and localism combine to give an advisory bill perhaps a 50-50 chance of passage.

Californians may soon be asked to vote on the unthinkable--the division of the state into Southern, Central and Northern California. How has this happened?

Last Wednesday, the state Senate sent to its Governmental Organization Committee an Assembly bill that proposes the breakup. Sponsored by Assemblyman Stan Statham (R-Oak Run), it passed the Assembly by a 46-26 vote. After governmental, the bill is scheduled to go to the Constitutional Amendments Committee, then to the Senate floor.

Has an idea that has always been considered crackpot crept into plausibility? Is it because Statham, a former disk jockey and TV news anchor, knows how to generate publicity? Or are deeper forces at work--forces related to the Kevin Starr is professor of planning and development and faculty master of Embassy Residential College at USC. His next book, “The Dream Endures: California Through the Great Depression,” will be published by Oxford University Press. failure of Sacramento to govern, the growing ethnic division in California and, from an international perspective, the rage for localism?

After all, the reasons for not dividing California are self-evident. The state sustains one vast water and irrigation infrastructure, for example, which north- ern and southern halves equally paid for. Don’t we have something called California in common--a heritage, a sense of historic destiny--that is profoundly attached to the present state borders?

In terms of its political boundaries, American California began as an abstraction. When legislators gathered in Monterey in 1849 to organize for statehood, they were confronted with a California that included Nevada, Arizona, parts of New Mexico and southern Colorado, and Baja. Realizing that such a behemoth was ungovernable and would never be admitted into the Union, the legislators wisely carved the present lines, basing them on the natural barriers provided by the Sierra Nevada and the Colorado Desert and the already established borders of the Oregon Territory. (Giving up Baja California was a mistake, however, because it is a natural extension of Southern California, to which it was joined throughout the Spanish and Mexican eras.)

Even after statehood, the definition of California remained ambiguous. As early as August, 1851, the Los Angeles Star editorialized that Southern California would be better off as a territory dependent upon the federal government than as six counties neglected by the state. The southern portion, the Star argued, received next to nothing for its tax dollar. That October, a convention met in Santa Barbara and called for the separation of the southern counties into the Territory of Colorado. Old Californians (read: Latino-Californians) were in the vanguard of this movement. Free from the domination of the Yankee North, the Latino-Californians wanted breathing space to achieve something that would be theirs and, at the same time, part of the Union.

In 1859, state Sen. Andres Pico succeeded in getting a breakup bill passed by the Legislature. It called for a Northern and Southern California. Pico’s bill was approved by popular vote and sent to Congress for consideration. The outbreak of the Civil War destroyed its chances.

Since that time, proposals to divide California--including the brief self-declared existence of the Territory of Nataqua in Lassen County in 1855 and discussion of a state of Jefferson in the northeast sector of California, which surfaced in the 1880s and again in the 1920s--have remained marginal.

But now comes AB 3, which is being seriously debated in the Legislature. There are many reasons.

The state government in Sacramento, for starters, has shown itself increasingly gridlocked, as the current budget debate--yet again--underscores. If California is an abstraction in terms of its political boundaries, it is becoming even more remote, more abstract, as a governmental entity. More and more taxes pour into Sacramento, while voters experience fewer and fewer state services on the local level. These days, Californians experience government primarily in terms of local districts--school, water, fire, police. Cities and towns provide the next discernible layer of government service, followed, somewhat remotely, by county government.

Thus the voters of California are in the same position that the Latino-Californians were in in 1851--not exactly sure about what they are getting from an entity called the State of California.

Then there is the ethnic question. South of the Tehachapis, Latino-Californians, as were their predecessors in the 1850s, are increasingly attracted to the idea of a Latino-dominated state of Southern California, in which they would hold clear-cut advantages of historical heritage, geographic propinquity to Mexico and the Spanish Southwest, and demographic dominance.

In the north, the Anglo population is increasingly disenchanted with bearing the costs of an increasingly Latinized--including undocumented--Southern California. Gov. Pete Wilson and Sen. Dianne Feinstein estimate that education, medical and correctional costs, on the state level, associated with the undocumented total $1.7 billion.

Thus, Latinos in the south have their reasons for looking to a separate state--to free themselves, at long last, from Anglo dominance; and the Anglo-dominated northern tier is becoming increasingly willing to say good-riddance; Southern California just costs too much. And besides, under the provisions of AB 3, Northern California would get Marin, an Anglo enclave, while polycultural San Francisco falls into Central California.

Central California is emerging as its own autonomous place. Ethnic rivalry is not a dramatic factor. Other factors--the fear of Southern Californianization, the using up, that is, of valuable agricultural lands in sprawling Southern California-style development--have encouraged Central Californians to consider going their own way.

Why should California, which has the eighth largest GNP in the world, be exempt from the forces that have broken up the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, for example? The more Sacramento is perceived as a self-sealed, inept, tax-devouring juggernaut; as long as the ethnic division of Latino and Anglo into southern and northern sectors continues; as long as localism continues to gain strength as a political force--the division of California into two or three states will remain a plausible point of debate.